How do I make Flowers out of icing for cake?!?
In the states, the classic company for learning to decorate cakes is Wilton’s. Their web site is: http://www.wilton.com/index.cfm Any stiff buttercream or shortening based icing will work. I’ve even used canned. If you want to make flowers that get hard, that you can make ahead and will last quite awhile (but taste terrible) you can make royal icing – which uses an egg white powder base. Wilton sells a mix for royal icing. The real key to making beautiful flowers are the decorating tips that you put in the pastry bag to pipe out the flowers. The grocery stores icings in the tubes that come with 2 or 3 tips are okay, but nothing is better then a parchment bag with a good quality tip.
The best type to use is royal icing – don’t have the recipe to hand, but as I recall, it needs egg-white, and is quite a stiff icing. You can use a few drops of food colouring, and then (dusting your hands with icing sugar first) use it like play-doh to shape them into flowers, or roll the icing out, and use a greaseproof paper template to cut them out. You could always use silver balls (the edible kind) if you can find them and put them in the centre of each flower for a decorative touch!
